skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3% conversion rate in this context is an empty statement. Conversion rate is entirely subjective to the product, its price, and the margins on the backend.

EDIT: I agree that a non-paying customer is just a user (duh) but the goal of a product is to grow your customer base (to meet the real goal of increasing your profit). So anyone using your product for free needs to be doing so as a means to an end: Either they will convert to a paying customer at some point, or they will refer paying customers.

If you're building a fun side project, free users are groovy. But if you're trying to grow a profitable company, and your free users aren't working for you in one way or another, they're just a liability.
There's a reason I disable Facebook buttons on my browser and don't stick them on my own sites (including my blog). I don't trust Facebook with my browsing data, and I don't want to subject users of any website I work on to their abuse, either.

"Move fast and break expectation of privacy"
Pedalboard.js: A JavaScript Guitar Effect Framework using the Web Audio API
Considering that there's no constitutional basis for even applying due process to the private sector, I think you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that's a good idea.
I saw a load of about 200-250 simultaneous visitors when one of my sites got posted from ycombinator to the reddit. After 12 hours it tapered off.
In the past, technology would provide efficiency to a problem, and a lot of times up root a job in the process. Which is okay, because a new job was created in the wake. Astute observers though might notice that the skill level has been increasing each time a job is transformed. This is okay when an evolution in technology is equivalent to a single lifetime, but as the evolution of technology speeds up the adaption becomes more difficult. I feel like we are seeing the effects of the last technological revolution today. As a software engineer, I get 4 emails a day from recruiters... but those with no technical skills are being unemployed in troves, and finding a job is near impossible.

So my question. What happens when an assumed intelligence explosion disrupts, an already disrupted world? I absolutely don't believe there's anything we can (or should) do to slow technological progress... but its an interesting topic to see how it affects society. There seems to be a disconnect, technology evolves exponentially, and society evolves linearly.
Well, thanks to Microsoft not allowing anyone except themselves access to the Win32 APIs on Windows 8 RT, ARM tablets aren't going to have Firefox on them.
I'm unsure how to take this. Foreign language skills in the US are dismal compared to just about any other country in the world. Usually by 7th grade most non english speaking europeans can at least communicate in English, whereas in the US (according to the article), foreign languages don't begin until after 7th grade. And the world is only getting more globalized, so the importance of being able to communicate in a foreign language is just as important as ever. That said, I agree that these skills should be attained much earlier, that's how it is in Germany, Poland, and the few other countries I have experience with. In high school you learn foreign langs, maths, the core skills, and once you're 18 you major in whatever and take only classes that relate to that subject.

All that being said, I'm a software developer and, in my opinion, the skills for programming are largely completely unrelated to those of communicating yourself in a foreign language. When you speak a foreign language, you have to convey abstract and complex thoughts in a matter of milliseconds, also comprehending what is being said, metaphors, slang, slurs, etc. In programming you're also in an abstract realm but you're dealing with numbers, functions, and non-verbal/acoustic information processing... So I don't think Programming should satisfy a College Language requirement, just teach the kids earlier, and do away with all non-relavent "requirements" once they go to college and major.

that's my 2 cents :)
CBBC Newsround - Boy sends robot to school in his place
This is one of the benefits of MaxMind MinFraud, another fraud risk evaluation service. Not only do they tell you the risk of each signup/purchase (on a 1-100 scale), but any other MinFraud customer can flag someone and every other company that recently evaluated the same person gets notified of the increased risk.
An important thing to keep in mind is that it's not that you are innately incapable of answering the question, you just may not be able to do so presently, which is why it's a great question.

People who are in a rut, or carrying a lot of baggage, (among others) are going to have trouble answering it, and they're probably also going to have trouble adjusting to a new position. Not to say that you are, but it would register as a possibility to an observant interviewer.

People who are currently active and engaged will not have trouble coming up with something, and they probably won't have trouble getting their point across in 5 minutes. You might actually have trouble stopping them after 5 minutes because you're engaged with what they're talking about. This is a good sign of someone who wants, and is ready for a new opportunity.

That said, I've used slightly constrained versions of this in interviews, like picking up on a side comment/complaint someone made early in the interview. It's a good way to really see someone hunker down and think and express themselves without putting them on the spot like a test. Note that you inserted the idea of the "best concept" on your own, you've made it into a test which implies a right answer, when it isn't. Things like that are warning signs when it comes to adding a new personality to a creative team, and why this style of question is so revealing.
Ditto. Impressive attitude.
Food for thought when you're thinking about niches to target: at my last company (http://www.surveygizmo.com), the co-founder & lead designer was a big supporter of web standards and accessibility. Not because he was a disabled activist, but just because he likes to write good code.

As it turned out, accessible surveys became a huge selling point to nonprofits that serve the disabled as well as governments, which often are mandated to be accessible. This gave the company an early boost as it was pretty much the only game in town for those markets.
I apologize beforehand because it's none of my business, but I must say that perhaps that's really not such a good plan. Life is short, but not (hopefully for your son) that short that you want to teach him algebra before the poor boy is even 5!

It might backfire. In many (but not most) cases the child actually gets to resent this kind of "education" instead of loving it.

It's great to want them to love reading books, love mathematics, love music, love science and encourage thinking, but a life-long passion for these good things is only guaranteed if they choose them.

Postpone your plan 3 years (5-8 instead of 2-5) and IMO it will be 10 times better.
The writer says (in his "remote" section, which appears to mean "about" to him, for some reason): "Also, I think it's splendid that the IETF finally got around to giving pirates, coders, and hackers our own TLD—it's about time!" I'm pretty sure that he simply isn't as clever as he thinks he's being.
> Conversion rate is entirely subjective to the product

Actually, conversion rate is completely objective - it is the percentage of users you have who 'convert' and become customers.

What that means for your company might be different from product to product and industry to industry, but a 3% conversion rate for freemium is awesome.
Hans Dockter on Gradle: Build Automation Evolved (video)
You are giving Bob the ability to unlock it himself. You temporarily add him to "the group that can enter my house" and then, without you being involved, Bob can get in or, more importantly, lock the door if he leaves when you aren't there.

My dad has a casita on his house that he frequently lets people use. Dealing with the key is always annoying, though. With this, he could say "My son will be here on the 10th-14th, my nephew will be here the 21st and 22nd, etc" and never have to worry that the key gets lost or copied.

Now they just need to tie in with alarm systems so it will deactivate the alarm at the same time it unlocks it (or at least provide a temporary code that the guest can use).
From what I understand, Jason Garrett-Glaser (DarkShikari) got interested in video encoding through the anime scene. He's now the lead developer on X264.
Yes, but then are they really freemium? I mean, I'm an eBay user but I'm not their customer (I'm their product) and I wouldn't consider myself 'freemium.'
Sorry to hear you had to fold up shop like that. It sounds like you have plenty of talents to fall back on but that probably doesn't remove any of the sting of having all your hard work swept away. That said, US Politicians have plenty of misdeeds to answer for, but over-regulating the financial sector is really not among them. The requirement to prove that you have some sort of income before getting a house loan was one of the things deregulation "fixed". It was bank policy not government policy that "allowed millions of people making $50K a year to buy $500,000 homes they could not afford". Check out Alan Greenspan's testimony before congress. Its easy to find on youtube.
No and yes (respectively). Rebase rewrites the history of whatever branch you are on. Squash converts a merge into a single commit on another branch.

Say you are working on a feature in a branch and have made several commits. Now it's time to clean them up in preparation for a merge. You can either squash the entire branch into one revision into master and create a new commit message (git merge --squash) or you can rebase.

If you rebase, you can use interactive mode (git rebase -i) and rewrite your local history however you see fit. You can reorder commits, remove commits, merge commits, edit commits, edit commit messages, anything. It's extremely powerful and lets you make the history of your current branch into whatever you want it to be. I use rebase -i quite a bit to merge "typo" commits into the original commit. Used sparingly rebasing really helps to keep your timeline clean.

You can also rebase while in master but you should not go older than the newest shared commit (origin's HEAD) nor should you edit other people's code during a rebase.
I would be a little bit afraid of working in a technical shop where "DRY" wasn't ubiquitous.
This is why legitimate Nigerians and Chinese are banned from half the Internet.
I think OP meant, "According to the DMCA, can't Facebook get away with just removing the content, warning you first, etc". We all understand they can do whatever they want and are not subject to the constitution in the way a government is. They could delete everyone's page, every single user's, without giving a single reason. But its probably not smart to. Hence we are discussing whether this is an intelligent move on their part, or if there are other reasons for this behavior.
Ya this appears to be the achilles heal of WebRTC and I was extremely disappointed (but not surprised) to hear that they chose to go this route of splitting data and media instead of layering media on top of data.

All I can think of is that there might be pressure from media companies and ISPs to block the media or data components.

This has happened before - we have UDP and TCP as independent protocols instead of having TCP built on UDP. This created the mess with firewalls and NAT that we have to live with today.
I know FB scans private messages. You cannot send links with certain domains without getting an error message. Sure, they don't have some dude in a cubical looking at each and every message, but if they are scanning for domains, how hard is it to scan for keywords within those private messages? Mention your new iPhone in a message, and you see ads for iPhone cases. Make a Tony Romo joke and you see ads for an RGIII jersey, etc etc.
In effect, you've reduced costs to make the PandaBot accessible to a class of people who aren't really your customer

And you know this how? I've been surprised at the consistent hostility of some people on HN to innovating on price. This is the same mentality that led to the US car market going temporarily insane and assuming that everyone wants the biggest SUV possible.
Cool, can I use this service to get my enemies' transactions refused?
One way of answering your question is that the ISS already has automated resupply missions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle

Secondarily, the limited time & manpower on the station makes streamlining a resupply mission good sense - as long as there aren't huge risks.
My interview at that workplace included no questions about politics or religion. However much they may later have made me feel uncomfortable in their company culture, they were experts at their craft and consummate professionals.
Salman Kahn on CNN. The future of credentials
How does whether the law supports something influence whether modifying the law is a good idea or not?
That's also deliberate by me as well. If they have enough options and they're busy enough then we shouldn't be working together because they have a fair amount on their plate.

It's not a perfect filter. You are indeed correct. I would be wary about a client that demonstrates certain traits as well.
If you are thinking about using node.js for this reason[1] on most sites, you are optimizing poorly. LinkedIn didn't worry about this until after they were a public company.

If Python/Djando or Ruby/Rails can get your app out the door and into customer hands faster, it is almost always the right thing to use.

1. There are certainly other, very valid, technical reasons for choosing node.js over other technologies early. But let those reasons be about the problems you are solving today, not the ones you might need to worry about when you have 50 servers to deal with.
Programming isn't fun in the same way that having a child isn't fun. At least I think the metaphor works having never had a child myself.
Hah, this is very interesting, but beyond the comical thought of bees eating M&M shells and excreting M&M honey, another example of pollution making things messy. I wonder if the health effects on this one are as severe as smoke stacks.
FFS, in the past political speech would be rejected by all sorts of publishers. This isn't a new issue.

Just as folk were then free to set up their own press to churn out leaflets, so too are folk now free to host their own content. In fact, the situation is probably a lot brighter now.
Easy to solve if someone publishes a credibility guide to websites, based on this analysis.
I suppose it depends on the person and on the job. For me, I list my hobbies and interests on my resume. So it's clearly relevant, as the interviewer has a copy of my resume and I had better be prepared to talk about what I wrote. For my job, my hobbies have always been relevant. I've been through about 15-20 interviews in my life so far and my hobbies have been a topic at every single interview. It's tough for me to imagine a job where these topics aren't relevant.

I appreciate that this may not be universally true, but for me it's mission critical.
Training People
vimeo.com/50608606
Toronto based company!
I personally find it hard to believe that all of LinkedIn was only running on 30 servers, and is now running on only 3.

EDIT: Mobile only. Maybe the title should be updated to reflect that.
I'm of South Asian descent and can relate to a lot of the points you make here. In particular, I'm classed as 'British Pakistani', so I get searched everywhere. This includes on the underground, customs at any airport and once getting ambushed by four plainclothes Japanese police officers in Tokyo station.[1]

That being said, my biggest exposure to racism has been from my own extended family towards people of just about every other race. Even my mother who's relatively moderate advised me to 'never trust the white man in the workplace' as they would always promote each other over a "Paki". My family has just about everything from your uncle with crackpot zionist conspiracy theories all the way up to real-life war criminals who raped their way across Bangladesh in the 70s[2].

The reason I bring this up is because it's the same hateful, blatant racism, but it happens behind closed doors and even receives protection from the government. In the eyes of my family, my Japanese wife is a kafir, or 'infidel' and in my family at least sub-human unless she converts to Islam.

I'm obviously an extreme case (I sincerely hope I am!), but anecdotally I don't think that my family is of the only minority that has this level of culturally ingrained racism. I have friends of East Asian descent who report similar sorts of stories from their own families 'back home'. My in-laws (who have literally never left Japan) are obviously racist, but not in any overtly malicious or harmful way, so I think I can forgive them the occasional awkward question about 'my people'.

Given my experiences it's very difficult to get all that worked up when our product manager mixes me up with the other brown guy in the office or when someone casually assumes that I had an arranged marriage. The perpetrators in this case feel guilty about their mistakes and apologize. That my own family doesn't have this level of cultural awareness is a source of immense personal anguish to me.

[1] I actually feel quite secure because I get searched as often as I do. In my case at least I believe the racial profiling is accurate. As a child I went to the mosques where the extremists preached and there's only a very fine thread of causality that lead to me being a Dawkins-quoting Atheist instead of a fundamentalist muslim.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_atrocities
Here's an issue: this doesn't blend in all that well with the Windows 8 environment. The tabs, for example, are rounded. It looks nice, but the whole idea of the Windows 8 interface is to do away with needless skeumorphism. Making browser tabs look like real-life folder tabs is just that. They're going the distance by making the buttons in Windows 8 style, Windows 8 style start page, touch features, etc. Why would they go with rounded tabs?
Entrepreneurs Should Stay in School
The ZBoard idea blows my mind, such a simple idea I can't believe wasn't created before now. Nicely done.
That's what MATCH (Member Alert to Control High-Risk Merchants) and TMF (Terminated Merchant File) are for.

When someone establishes a merchant account, they must provide the tax IDs (SSNs) of the principals of the business, not just the business itself. If the account is terminated for an egregious offense, like fraud, all those principals get added to MATCH and TMF, which all acquiring banks have access to when reviewing new applications.

In theory, it should be impossible to open multiple Visa/MasterCard merchant accounts for fraudulent purposes without having a new human being signing up each time, not just a new shell corporation.
They scan for even more than that, they'll report you to the FBI if they suspect you of illegal activity.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-pr...
Doesn't sound like a big deal at all. There certainly aren't any privacy implications. When you send a link to a website via PM the 'like' counter on that page on that website will increase by one. Makes sense (not perfect though e.g. if you're directing a friend to something you don't like). It's not like the 'like' is then shared publicly to your friends not part of the private conversation.
Forgive me, but that's fundamentally intellectually dishonest – if you make an argument with completely fictitious numbers and know its seriously flawed but still put it forward as if it's genuine, you're simply lying to support your argument.

If you have real numbers, use them.

If you don't, this all sounds a lot like the sort of "numerical" support for anti-piracy measures made by record companies. The interconnection between the marketing role of a free option and its numerical effect on sales is going to be highly nuanced.

Further, there are clear-cut reasons that "Big customer databases" are valuable even if "they’re [not all] ponying up cash."

The first, discussed elsewhere here, are network effects. Dropbox gets more and more valuable for paying users every time a free user signs up because it makes it all the more likely that the next person they need to share a file with will be able to easily handle a DB share.

Second, building a big user-base of devoted users, even if a large percentage are free users, potential builds a barrier to entry for any possible competitors – thus protecting the revenue from the existing paid users and encouraging future paid users.

Still, I believe that underlying your whole post is the important point that you must have a solid business plan and understand just how you are going to drive profits – be it freemium or otherwise and that's a very important point, so thank you for calling it out.
Thanks to the market leader for making this an acceptable practice.
Reading this like: "Hey, our previous backend was a total turd, technically speaking." It might be trivial to speed up your own crappy first implementation 20x with some extra TLC.
Facebook Hits 1 Billion Users, Here’s How It Hits $141 Billion in Value
Targeter App offers free CRO for a limited time
It only took me a sec. I was going to explain how to cook the perfect scrambled eggs.
non youtube version vimeo.com/50608606
So, that's a sample size of 1. Not quite what we would call scientifically rigorous ;). I'm not saying it's not a useful question. I'm just saying, you jump to a whole lot of conclusions that are clearly not based on evidence in your hiring process. That's fine, just be aware that your hiring process is not doing what you're thinking or asserting it's doing.
This is some amazing stuff.

Can I trust you? ;)
I think it depends on the job. If I'm in project manager or manager mode, I might say "That's not relevant," but if I'm wearing my developer hat part of my job is providing information and so I'd be more than willing to jump down the rabbit hole.
You're saying that when someone freezes up in an interview it predicts that they will have trouble adjusting to a new position.

Simply put, why should I believe that? Can you convince me that this is not simply like any pseudodiagnostic personality test or tea-leaf reading?
Surely by flagging them yourself, you wouldn't be accepting their transactions and so first and foremost hurting your own business?
It's certainly looking more "metro" than Chrome attempt so far. I kinda like that it's a bit of a fusion of both, still keeping some elements identifiable as Firefox.
The aggressive caching approach taken by Basecamp Next is another example of such an optimization: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...
You know what's economically unfeasible? An unstable climate created by forever burning coal.
Power vs Control
Is there a setting to change the UI to English? I can muddle through a few things but I feel I'm missing out.
Show HN: What do you get if you cross Arduino and node.js?
Speaking of rigid - what's it with the heatbed (?) bending to the left as soon as it changes direction in the video (at around 0:50 - 0:55)
I won't answer when the caller has masked their phone number. I have too many things to do. They can leave a msg if it's important. They never do.
I'm going to try to answer your question but I imagine it's very Anna Karenina-esque: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Often the problem is the size of the firm, allowing institutional problems to sabotage otherwise good practices. Instead of recognizing and promoting the things that will improve the firm long-term, they implement good hiring practices only to prevent lawsuits, bad press, etc.

Revitalizing a large company before it dies is a very difficult problem.